Thursday, 20 February 2014

A future of compromise and the long shadow of temperance

I’ve been thinking about compromise in alcohol policy a lot
recently. There’s two main reasons for
this.

First, I’ve been reading Robert Duncan’s Pubs
and Patriots, in which he paints a picture of late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth century debates as characterised by ‘antagonistic squabbling’
between the trade and the temperance movement.

This adversarial approach has something in common with the
second reason I’ve been thinking about compromise. As I’ve discussed before
on this blog, I think the current policy debate is unhelpfully adversarial
between health and industry.

One of the remarkable things about most of the twentieth
century (merely coincidentally the period before I started drinking), is that
alcohol wasn’t a huge or controversial public policy issue in the way it is
today. Indeed, although there was
concern about lager louts and something of ‘binge’ drinking, James Nicholls’
work suggests that the panic (not necessarily a moral panic) really sprang
up in light of the Labour government’s proposals to expand licensing hours with
the 2003 Licensing Act.

There’s all sorts of reasons behind this change – and public
health campaigners would point out that the increased panic fits reasonably
neatly with consumption and harm figures going up, and these have largely
followed affordability indices. There
are serious questions to be asked about the reliability and validity of the
figures used, but it’s reasonable to think that alcohol is more affordable for
most people than it used to be, and affordability affects consumption.

The key thing I was reminded of when finishing Pubs and Patriots was the comparison
that can be made with the Second World War, when alcohol was not such a prominent
political issue. Robert Duncan would
probably argue that policymakers had come to their senses and freed
themselves from temperance prejudices.
However, you could also point out that actual consumption per head was
much lower in 1939 than 1914. That is,
objectively the ‘problem’ had been dealt with.

I’ll stick my neck out and take the classic sensible
historian’s approach of suggesting that in reality it was a bit of both.

It’s not simply that affordability and availability changed;
more than that the WW1 reforms helped shape the culture around alcohol – and
the industry arguably played a crucial role in that, or at least in how this
was taken forward in the inter-war period.

In
some work, attention has been drawn to the ways in which ‘traditional’ pubs
might have a role to play in toning down young people’s drinking by offering a
more supervised environment than either drinking at home or in ‘vertical
drinking’ style establishments. Similar
ideas about the value of the pub to local community have
been promoted by the BBPA, linked
to the idea of ‘the pub is the hub’. In fact fostering cohesive communities can be
seen as something that could promote public health.

That is, pubs could have a role in promoting public
health.

I’ve written before about the
idea of engaging the industry (especially
at a local level), and I get the feeling that the same ideas of
collaboration and dilution of principles are being played out today as 100
years ago when state purchase of the industry was mooted. This was seen as something like a partnership
with the devil by some temperance campaigners, much as legalization of drugs
today might be viewed.

All policy is of course compromise, as there are many
competing objectives, and so for my money this doesn’t sound like such a bad
idea – especially as it’s not clear that the adversarial approach has led to
better policymaking

Looking at the local area I’ve researched, however, the
opportunity for this sort of compromise vision is somewhat limited. You could argue that Bournemouth’s very
reputation as somewhere that has moved from ‘blue rinse to hedonism’
illustrates the problem.

Part of the town’s construction and appeal as a
‘respectable’ nineteenth-century resort was that it didn’t have pubs and licences
generally in the town centre. The train
station was even deliberately placed far from the beach in the hope that this
would deter day trippers and those who couldn’t afford the cost of a carriage
ride into town.

This made it, in a sense, an ideal location for the growth
of the night-time economy – it wasn’t a question of remodelling pubs; this was
almost a tabula rasa. As a tourist
resort, this worked, and the prevalence of (arguably bland) chain pubs, bars
and clubs makes sense when you realise that a key part of the customer base is
people who are just coming for the one night: people feel more comfortable
going into a venue where they know what they’re going to get, rather than a
gamble on a local variant.

My
research has drawn attention to how this apparently bland, homogenised high
street is in fact anything but in the eyes of the customers themselves: they
have very clear ideas about the differences between venues, drinking practices
and people. However, there’s no denying
that in academic and policy circles there’s an interest in moving away from
what is seen as a concentration of binge-oriented venues. Academics,
consultants,
local authority officials and elected council members all talk about
‘diversity’ and ‘food-led’ venues – and even the value of the traditional pub.

So Bournemouth’s selling point of the nineteenth century –
of a place of moderation, wellbeing and health – might actually limit its
ability to move away from the ‘binge’ economy of the late 20th and
early 21st centuries. Now
there’s an interesting legacy of temperance and apparent moderation. Perhaps moderation in all things should have
included a few pubs too – and in the spirit of moderation, maybe working
together in the future wouldn’t be such a bad idea?

Disclaimer (20/02/2014):
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting here that I support the idea of wellbeing in tourism, or that I think Bournemouth should go down this route as a way of 'selling' itself as a resort. In fact, I've written an academic paper somewhat criticising the aspiration of 'civilising' the town that local members seem to have.

I'm more interested in the ways that pubs could be mobilised to support what is sometimes seen as a neo-temperance approach to pleasure and tourism - and how nineteenth century temperance and respectability has perhaps made that idea more difficult in Bournemouth.

2 comments:

Like the blog Will. I agree that greater engagement between industry and public health would probably be constructive. Just to expand on your points about the second world war, it's notable that pubs became the basis of some efforts to raise money for the war effort - such as War Weapons Week. Ensuring a good supply of beer to troops and civilians also became seen as an important government priority. So the differences between the two worlds wars are quite stark where drink is concerned.

Talking about the shadow of temperance in contemporary politics I should probably nod to you: http://socresonline.org.uk/14/2/6/6.pdf

On the WW2 point, it's the attitude of government I find most interesting - the industry and pubs did try to portray themselves as supporting the war effort during WW1; it's just that the public (or policymaking) mood wasn't with them. I'm not sure Robert Duncan quite gets at why that was.

And there's definitely a sense that beer was almost one of the thins Britain was fighting for in WW2.

I think Duncan could have made more of the differences between the two wars - something I've pointed out in a forthcoming review.

About Me

I live and work in Dorchester, a beautiful town in Dorset not far from the south coast.
I’m a Senior Health Programme Advisor within the team that commissions drug and alcohol treatment services through Public Health Dorset, which operates across Bournemouth, Poole and rural Dorset.
I'm also a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at Bournemouth University.
How did I get here? Well I did a PhD, also at Bournemouth University, looking at ‘binge’ drinking in Bournemouth and thinking about how class and gender are part of how people understand their own and other people’s drinking. (Search on eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk)
After finishing the PhD I moved to London for a couple of years and worked for the Russell Group of universities, dealing most closely with issues of community engagement, widening participation and, unexpectedly, immigration.
When an opportunity came up to head back down to Dorset and work on drug and alcohol issues, I grabbed it with both hands.
I'm on Twitter: @WilliamHaydock